BENGALURU: Nita Sachan has an academic background that spans agriculture, pharmacology and cardiology. But unlike her family members, who are all scientists, she heads strategy and business development at Mapmygenome, a Hyderabad-based molecular diagnostics company.

A new breed of super-specialised professionals previously not accommodated by traditional industries are entering the wider job market, thanks mainly to startups.

Professionals like Sachan, who have PhDs or Masters in fields as diverse as theoretical physics, spectroscopy and linguistics, are being poached from university research centres to help startups increase their pace of innovation in areas like artificial intelligence. “India is making an incredibly huge transition from ‘back-office hub’ to ‘innovation boiler room’,” said Shridhar Marri, chief executive of Senseforth Technologies, which in the next two years plans to hire at least 30% of its employees from pure science backgrounds to work on natural language processing. “This transition will spawn a new breed of cross-fertilized pure science careers.”

With a majority of India’s technology startups trying to decode consumer behaviour, automate complex processes, analyse mountains of data, or make computers smarter, professionals with expertise in niche science fields have come to be in demand in ecommerce and enterprise product companies as well.

“In a field like machine learning, we have hired some of the world’s best experts — PhDs from Stanford and MIT,” Flipkart’s head of corporate development Nishant Verman said in an earlier conversation with ET. Ravi Vijayaraghavan, VP and head-analytics, and Mohit Kumar, a data scientist at Flipkart, are among the PhD holders in the firm. For several core science researchers and academics, startups have emerged as a dynamic alternative, allowing them to get out of the confines of universities and leapfrog their careers. “Working for a startup is rewarding because you get to wear multiple hats — from working on business strategy, development to marketing, communications as well as the commercial aspects of the scientific research,” said Sachan, who has a PhD in molecular biology and biochemistry from the University of Kentucky.

For Smriti Singh, a research lead at Senseforth, the startup has presented her with better prospects than academia. The company helps enterprises by enabling computers make sense of customer complaints and resolve these quickly.

“I could have eventually become a professor. But I could see myself getting a smart place in the tech sector,” said Singh, who studied computational linguistics at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. Hundreds of startups, large and small, are scouting for computational linguists, she said. Recruitment firms said they are seeing more such professionals being hired by startups, even if they do not get specific requests for people with experience in research.

“The job specialisation is so narrow that it can easily alert a competitor on the company’s new area of research,” said Aneesh Passi, cofounder of recruitment firm Basil Advisors. It’s not always a cozy deal for researchers and academics at startups. For one, the salary of a senior software engineer will likely be higher than that of a PhD degreeholder with equal experience.

Also, “the patents are owned by the companies they work for, (but) they get a lot of recognition in the industry,” said Prasanth Perugupalli, managing director at IMEC India, a Belgium-based nonprofit that is trying to digitise pathology slides, which requires bringing together imaging and analytics capabilities to the biology lab.